How We got to Coney Island: the Development of Mass Transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Walton, John K

Brian J. Cudahy, How We got to Coney Island: the Development of Mass Transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County, Fordham University Press, New York (2002) 364 pp., US$25.00.

This is an example of a familiar and decidedly old-fashioned genre of transport history. It is primarily an examination of the business politics of railway development and amalgamation in Brooklyn and adjoining districts since the mid-nineteenth century, with excursions into competing modes of transport (the steamboat gets a good deal more attention than the internal combustion engine, in any of the latter's incarnations), and with particular reference to the journey from Brooklyn in particular and New York more broadly to the popular resort areas and (increasingly) residential districts of Coney Island. The focus on Coney Island is much less strongly sustained in the text than the garish dust jacket suggests, and a great deal of detailed exposition is devoted to the development of routes and services that were of only incidental relevance to the Coney Island traffic; or at least, the exact nature of that relevance is not made clear.

This is only intermittently, and to a limited extent, an analytical work. The author's main purpose is to offer blow-by-blow accounts of the battles for territory between businessmen and corporations, to provide detailed topographical expositions of the development of an extremely complicated metropolitan transport system, and to describe the rolling stock of the companies. In the process, a good deal of interesting material is provided on the history of transport technology in this setting (the electrification of most of the routes in the 1890s, the spread of the elevated railway, the - very briefly described - transition from trams to motor buses); on the shifting relationships between municipal government and increasingly corporate private enterprise, as the former took over the initiative from the latter; on the politics of gaining permission not just for the routes themselves but for their electrification and improvement; on the issues raised both by the long persistence of 'double fares' between central Brooklyn and Coney Island and by the persistence of an inelastic fares regime in a period of price inflation; and on the problems of congestion, safety and delays at particular bottlenecks along the routes. But there is disappointingly little on the users of these transport systems and on how they contributed to the relationships between home, work and leisure as experienced by those who travelled on them; and the sheer density and complexity of the local detail make the changing patterns of provision, and their implications, very hard for an outsider to grasp. Very little is said about the rise of the private car, a strange omission in this setting; and the passages on Coney Island itself remain isolated from the main narratives and arguments, with no attempt to engage with the question of just how the rise of electric railways, tramways and mass transit, as a process, affected the fortunes of the resort. Robert Moses gets a surprisingly good press, although without reference to Caro's classic critical biography of New York City's 'power broker'; and there are many other omissions from the bibliography. This is mainly a scholarly but antiquarian history of transport provision, and the wider connections have to be teased out, as far as the text allows, by the attentive reader.

Nor is the detail always accurate or the exposition clear, as in the claim (p. 33) that the first electric street tramway in the world 'to achieve permanent and lasting success' (sic) was in Richmond VA in 1888. Not so: it was in Blackpool, Britain's answer to Coney Island, three years earlier. It is not at all clear, for example, what made a Forney locomotive, as used on the elevated railways, so different from an ordinary tank engine that a patent could be taken out on it (p. 114). Too much ink is spilled on parochial issues of definition, such as the identity of the first elevated railway in Kings County (p. 106). And towards the end of the book the author's priorities are given free rein (p. 271): 'There is one delightful trolley coach story dating from the years of the second World War that, while undoubtedly untrue, bears repeating, especially since it involves service to and from Coney Island.' That is all very well; but why is it here, and what is the point of it? Too much of this book provokes such hostile questioning in the reader; and this is a pity, because a lot of labour has gone into its compilation, and there is a great deal of useful material to be quarried from its pages.

John K. Walton, University of Central Lancashire